Republicans say the stimulus failed; the White House says
it worked to curb job losses at the height of the recession. A
May report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office
concluded the stimulus increased the number of people working
during the first quarter of this year by between 1.2 and 3.3
million and lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.6 and 1.8
percentage points.

The issue has become such a complicated sale to voters that
President Barack Obama doesn’t regularly bring it up. In
contrast, Biden routinely highlights the signature assignment
that helped transform his image from a gaffe-prone presidential
partner to an influential voice inside the administration.

“He deserves a great deal of credit for overseeing a very,
very difficult expedited program,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s
campaign strategist and former White House aide.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican
who heads the small government activist group FreedomWorks,
which helped organize the 2009 summer Tea Party protests, takes
a different view.

White House Fantasy

“The only people who can have any fantasy that the
stimulus was a good thing that did something for America are the
people in the White House and a couple of misguided college
professors,” said Armey. “Joe Biden as the sheriff on the
stimulus package is a concept without substance.”

A July 8 Labor Department report showing the smallest
monthly job growth in more than a year and an increase to 9.2
percent in the unemployment rate prompted a fresh cascade of
criticism from Obama’s potential presidential rivals.

Minnesota Representative and Republican presidential
candidate Michele Bachmann called the June jobs report “another
stark reminder of the failure of President Obama’s economic
policies,” in a statement posted on her website. “The
president promised if we passed the massive stimulus package
that unemployment wouldn’t go above 8 percent. We are now at 9.2
percent,” she added.

As the program winds down, the slow economic recovery and
corresponding state government budget shortfalls are exposing
the fragile stability the program provided for some.

In one local Florida school system, 375 jobs were sustained
with approximately $54 million in stimulus money over the past
two years. This fall, 60 of those positions will be cut because
of lack of funds, said Deputy Superintendent Diana Greene.

“The stimulus is a band-aid that’s being ripped off,”
said Noelle Ellerson, an American Association of School
Administrators analyst.

Biden’s Expanding Role

Teachers, firefighters and police officers were backdrops
for Biden as he made 45 trips outside Washington promoting the
program.

While he was still managing the stimulus, Obama asked the
68-year-old vice president to help push an overhaul of the
health-care system through the Senate. Biden also attends
foreign policy discussions, including Oval Office debates over
the Afghanistan war in which Biden pressed unsuccessfully
against the 2009 troop surge. Since then, Obama has moved closer
to Biden’s position, said Steve Clemons, an analyst at the New
America Foundation, a policy research organization, who has
counseled the White House on policy issues.

Debt Talks

This spring, the president asked Biden to lead bipartisan
talks aimed at brokering a deficit-reduction package that will
clear the way for lifting the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling. The
so-called “Biden talks” could now provide a framework for a
final deal.

“People take him seriously and it’s not an easy thing to
be taken seriously as a vice president,” said H.W. Brands, a
presidential scholar at the University of Texas at Austin.

When Obama announced on June 13 Biden’s leadership of the
Government Accountability and Transparency Board, which aims to
eliminate waste and abuse, the vice president said
implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act --
the stimulus’s formal name -- would be his model.

“The first major test of our commitment to change the way
government does business was the recovery act,” he said, and it
will be the “standard by which we would judge all future
programs.” Biden wasn’t available for an interview for this
article.

Senate Relationships

Biden was involved in the stimulus program from the outset.
He used relationships built during 36 years in the U.S. Senate
to help pass it in February 2009. Former Pennsylvania Senator
Arlen Specter said the vice president called him 14 times in two
days to win his vote. Specter was one of three Senate
Republicans to back the legislation. Biden later helped persuade
Specter to switch parties.

Each Thursday, Biden received an update on the distribution
of stimulus money before it was posted publicly. He held round-table discussions with department administrators to stay on top
of the implementation, and imposed a 24-hour response time on
any questions or concerns raised by state and local officials.

He also brought governors and local officials to the White
House and lectured them about the importance of avoiding
scandal. Former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat,
and former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, a Republican, said
Biden called them monthly to check on progress.

The vice president handed oversight of the stimulus in
February 2011 to Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob
Lew.

Jobs in Jeopardy

Today, many jobs the White House takes credit for saving or
creating are in jeopardy because of state budget cuts and the
expiration of the stimulus program. Economic forecasters are
warning that a retraction of public sector jobs could slow the
recovery even further and extend the high unemployment rate.

A primary reason the unemployment rate ticked up in June,
the labor report showed, was that 39,000 lost jobs from the
federal, state and local governments undercut the 57,000 jobs
gained in the private sector.

In addition to teachers, law enforcement is a stimulus
beneficiary now contracting. The Recovery Act helped 1,297
police officers keep their jobs and funded 3,389 new police
officer positions, according to Department of Justice
spokeswoman Jessica Smith. Now “tens of thousands” of police
officers are likely to be laid off, said Jim Pasco, a Fraternal
Order of Police spokesman.

Two years ago, the police department in Trenton, New
Jersey hired 16 new officers using $2.96 million stimulus
dollars, according to Detective Alexis Durlacher, the
department’s grant manager. In September, those 16 officers --
plus 95 of their colleagues -- will lose their jobs.

State Budget Shortfalls

Perdue, the former Georgia governor, sees wider erosion.
About $9.51 billion in stimulus funds were distributed to the
state, private businesses and other entities including
universities and contractors, according to the Recovery Board.

Now, new Republican Governor Nathan Deal, who opposed the
stimulus while serving in the House in 2009, faces a projected
$823 million budget deficit in 2011 and a $1.94 billion deficit
in 2012, according to the nonpartisan Georgia Budget and Policy
Institute.

“I was concerned from the very beginning that the stimulus
was like a flash flood on a dry creek bed,” Perdue said. “That
while we would get some needed rain, it would come so hard and
so fast that most of it would run off and really not soak in.”

At a Feb. 17 event turning oversight of the stimulus over
to Lew, Biden said there were limits of the program and he
nodded to the messaging challenge going into the campaign.

“We lost several trillion dollars in the economy, real
loss,” he said. “The idea that we can spend $800 billion, no
matter how well we spent it, to fill in that deep hole we had
been thrust into -- we never advertised that.”